Reconsiderations

• Single page /
• Email /
• Print

In his influential commentary on Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, the scholar Hermann J. Weigand called it “the epic of disease.” It is more accurate to say that the novel is the epic of a particular disease, tuberculosis, one which has accompanied humans at least since they started building and settling in cities. But it is also, in a broader sense, an epic of illness—an ambitious attempt to show how being ill was experienced at a particular time in a particular culture. In the nineteenth century, and not just in Germany, tuberculosis was the Romantic’s illness; that is, those afflicted with TB were considered sensitive, brooding, creative, and interesting. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes to a sanatorium for a three-week visit with his sick cousin but ends up staying for seven years, adopting the role of the TB patient with a sense of exaltation and even elation. But if Hans is part Romantic hero, he is also part arch-malinger, a young man who does everything he can to join the institutionally coddled life at the mountaintop. He is on a quest: to pass through illness to rediscover the ethics of normal life. That is a search we have all embarked upon. The magic mountain is no longer a retreat or social height; it is our everyday. As the sociologist Nikolas Rose comments, “Like Hans Castorp upon his magic mountain, our stay in the sanatorium is not limited to a brief and terminable episode of illness. It is a sentence without limits and without walls, in which, apparently of our own free will and with the best of intentions on all sides, our existence has become bound to the ministrations and adjudications of medical expertise.”

When Mann wrote his novel, tuberculosis was at a significant juncture in its history. The discovery of the X-ray in 1895 had suddenly made it possible to detect early, active pulmonary forms of the disease. Medicine’s diagnostic capability was, however, decades ahead of its therapeutic capacity, and effective antibacterial treatments for TB did not emerge until after World War II. (Even today, despite the drugs available to treat it, TB remains a major public health problem in many developing countries.) Mann sets The Magic Mountain in 1907 at one of the only therapeutic options then available, the sanatorium. It was an option open only to better-heeled European patients. An Alpine regime of rest and rich food was thought to provide the best chance for recovery from TB, and for the body to reveal its healing wisdom. It certainly isolated patients with active disease (and who were spreading the infection through coughing or sneezing) and created local environments that must have had high circulating levels of airborne bacilli. But that is bacteriology, not the stuff of an epic of illness. There is another quality to the atmosphere of the Haus Berghof on the Davos plateau, to which Mann in the opening pages of his novel propels Hans, who has just passed his engineering exams in Hamburg. The air of the mountains, much as in the Bergfilme (mountain films) that were so popular in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s—and later promoted by the Nazis as the German answer to the Western movie—proves to be anything but pure and clean; it is a narcotic, heady and disorientating.

1. 1
2. 2
3. 3
4. 4
5. 5
6. 6
7. 7
8. Next »

• Single page /
• Email /
• Print